- Oil spill from stricken tanker has reached Oman’s coast
Source: Al Jazeera [Qatari state media]
“A major oil spill off Oman has spread to the country’s mainland, polluting beaches along the central coast, environmental authorities have said. Oil from the Caroline Bezengi, a tanker that has been leaking crude since running aground off Oman in June, has reached beaches in Ras Madrakah, affecting up to 40km (25 miles) of coastline, the sultanate’s Environment Authority said on Wednesday. … The Caroline Bezengi has been disabled near Oman’s Al Hallaniyat Islands since June 8, when the ship’s crew reported a suspected explosion. The cause of the incident has not been reported.” (08/13/26)
- US DOJ charges former SPLC official
Source: United Press International
“The Trump administration has filed fraud-related charges against a former Southern Poverty Law Center official who testified during the Jan. 6 insurrection investigation, as its crack down on the anti-hate [sic] group and President Donald Trump’s perceived opponents. The Justice Department originally charged SPLC in an 11-count indictment in April, alleging that the frequent target of right-wing criticism had defrauded donors by using their money to pay informants within hate groups they were monitoring. The Trump administration has framed the payments as paying the hate groups it was supposed to monitor, such as the KKK. SPLC vehemently denies the allegations.” (08/13/26)
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/08/13/DOJ-SPLC-Heidi-Beirich/1071786603470/
- Putin visits disputed Kuril islands, sparking protest from Japan
Source: France 24 [French state media]
“Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the far-eastern Kuril islands for the first time on Thursday, prompting a ‘strong’ protest by Japan, which also claims the territory. Russian-Japanese relations have long been dogged by tensions over the contested islands, known in Japan as the Northern Territories and seized by the Soviet Union in 1945. The Kremlin posted a video of Putin in the Kuril Islands, with Russian media saying he visited a fish-processing plant where he was given caviar. Putin travelled to the Kurils after visiting the nearby Russian island of Sakhalin, where Russia’s navy was conducting drills. … The four contested isles are part of the volcanic Kuril archipelago, which runs in a broad arc from Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula down to Japan’s main northern island Hokkaido.” (08/13/26)
https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20260813-putin-visits-kuril-islands-claimed-by-japan
- Russian strike sparks fire at Ukraine port; Zelenskyy seeks interceptors
Source: Al Jazeera [Qatari state media]
“Russian forces have struck Ukraine’s Izmail port in southern Odesa, setting off a fire, authorities said, a day after Kyiv pounded Russia’s Novorossiysk port. In a statement on the Telegram app early on Thursday, the Izmail Regional State Administration said Russian forces struck ‘port infrastructure’, causing damage and a fire. … Izmail, close to the Romanian border, is home to Ukraine’s largest Danube port, handling grain and other commodities. The attacks came as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN that the country needs 5 percent of the United States’s Patriot interceptor missiles to get through the winter and 10 percent to destroy all of Russia’s ballistic projectiles.” (08/13/26)
- ICE gang plans to equip street-level thugs with electric shock gloves
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)[gang members] may soon be equipped with gloves that can deliver electric shocks as they carry out their law enforcement duties. ICE plans to spend up to $20m (£14.8m) to buy the Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (GLOVE), according to a note published on Monday by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The gloves can deliver up to 380 volts of electricity, roughly three times the charge of a standard US power outlet.” (08/12/26)
- Bitcoin Drops to $63,500 as CPI Data Meets Expectations While AI Stocks Rally
Source: Blockonomi [UK]
“Bitcoin retreated toward $63,500 during Thursday trading, declining approximately 0.5% for the session and approaching 2% losses for the week. July’s Consumer Price Index registered a monthly increase of 0.1% with annual inflation reaching 3.4%. The core measure, excluding volatile food and energy components, advanced 0.2% monthly while moderating to 2.5% annually. … Broader cryptocurrency weakness prevailed across major tokens. Dogecoin declined approximately 3% to 7 cents. XRP surrendered more than 1% to reach $1, extending weekly losses near 5%. Solana edged lower by under 1% to $76, while Ether dropped fractionally to $1,880.” (08/13/26)
https://blockonomi.com/bitcoin-drops-to-63500-as-cpi-data-meets-expectations-while-ai-stocks-rally/
- IRGC adviser: Iran could “prolong war” until Trump is out of office
Source: WION [India]
“A top adviser to the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Wednesday that Iran could ‘prolong’ the war with the US until President Donald Trump is out of office. ‘We have to attain deterrence so that the enemy never dares to attack us, so we can live with security,’ Mohammad Reza Naqdi told PBS in an interview. … ‘One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition so that if anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost,’ he said.” (08/13/26)
- Karoline Leavitt stepping down as White House press secretary
Source: Axios
“Karoline Leavitt will be stepping down from her role as White House press secretary at the end of the month, President Trump announced Wednesday in a Truth Social post. Leavitt is leaving to spend more time with her family, the president said. A member of Trump’s team who followed him from his presidential campaign to the White House, she’s been a fiercely loyal face of the White House. Trump said in the surprise post that Leavitt will become one of his top outside advisers and ‘an influential voice within the Republican Party’ heading into the midterm elections.” (08/12/26)
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/12/trump-karoline-leavitt-white-house-press
- Rescuers evacuate more than 200 from a ferry fire that left at least 1 dead near Bali
Source: Associated Press
“Crews rescued 211 people and recovered the body of a passenger from a ferry that caught fire in rough seas Wednesday near the Indonesian tourist island of Bali, authorities said. The Putri Yasmin ferry was traveling from Bali to the neighboring island of Lombok in West Nusa Tenggara province when the fire broke out at about 4:15 a.m. The ferry was also transporting 44 vehicles and 53 motorcycles. … The rescue agency said that as of Wednesday afternoon, rescuers evacuated 211 people from the burned vessel, including 2 Australian tourists, and recovered the body of a 19-year-old Indonesian woman.” (08/12/26)
https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-bali-lombok-ferry-fire-ab527cf29730147f86c4c82f341584eb
- Why Byron Donalds Fails the Free Market Test for Florida Governor
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey“While yes, others are competing in the Democratic and Republican Party primaries, it is clear Byron Donalds will be Florida’s next governor. Sadly, he and most of his competitors represent expansion of government power rather than expanding individual freedoms for Floridians and tourists visiting our state. This leaves principled voters looking for a genuine alternative—good luck. So, unless the insider trading and other allegations bear fruit, Donalds is the frontrunner to be Florida’s next governor, though I’d prefer to see a more freedom-based Floridian in the governor’s mansion. Donalds is no free market capitalist, regardless of his rhetoric.” (08/13/26)
https://palmbeachexaminer.substack.com/p/why-byron-donalds-fails-the-free
- US looking for “new creative” ways to fight a war it’s already “won”
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Mark Thompson“When you run out of munitions, start launching threats. That’s obviously President Donald Trump’s latest strategy (to misuse the word) as his promised short war against Iran drags into its sixth month. It’s The Bunker’s grim mission to note where the U.S. military is falling short. Much of that is due to the military itself, but just as large a share is the responsibility of the institutional factors that fund it, enable it, and order it into action. Bottom line: Focusing on fixing an airplane in hopes that it can fly right won’t work if you only tinker with those ailerons trailing off its wings, while ignoring the fuselage, engines, and crew.” (08/13/26)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-military-procurement-problems/
- Washington Can Only Make Mali’s Crisis Worse
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen“Mali remains in chaos. Al-Qaeda-linked militants and Tuareg separatists have recently demonstrated an ability to coordinate attacks against the Malian military, while the country’s Russian-backed junta struggles to maintain control over territory far beyond the capital. Violence has spread across the Sahel, and Mali remains one of the epicenters of the region’s seemingly endless war against jihadist insurgencies. Washington’s answer, as usual, is to ask what more it can do. That is the wrong question. The more important question is what Washington has already done.” (08/13/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/washington-can-only-make-malis-crisis-worse
- Why a BRICS Gold Standard Is a Fiction
Source: Cobden Centre
by Jeremy E Powell“Ever since the sanctions onto Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, combined with real domestic economic anxieties of the post-pandemic era and declining institutional trust, a handful of libertarians and a mix of anti-war conservatives and the far-left have been announcing that de-dollarization was inevitable, prompted by BRICS’s desire to pursue a gold-backed currency.” (08/13/26)
https://www.cobdencentre.org/2026/08/why-a-brics-gold-standard-is-a-fiction/
- When “Victory” No Longer Justifies the Iran War
Source: Antiwar.com
by Timothy Hopper“CNN reported this weekend that Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has privately urged senior Trump administration officials to look for an ‘off-ramp’ from the war with Iran. According to three sources familiar with the discussions, Caine has warned that further escalation could backfire and that airpower alone is unlikely to achieve President Donald Trump’s stated objectives. His team declined to discuss confidential conversations, and the White House emphasized that Caine provides the president with options rather than policy prescriptions. That distinction matters. Caine is the president’s senior military adviser, not the official who decides where the war should end. But the report exposes the question Washington can no longer avoid: not whether the United States has enough power to continue fighting, but how much of its future power it should spend on a mission whose political endpoint remains uncertain.” (08/13/26)
https://original.antiwar.com/timothy_hopper/2026/08/12/when-victory-no-longer-justifies-the-iran-war
- We need to talk about Fight Club
Source: UnHerd
by Chuck Palahniuk“Philadelphia, 2019. An Uber is hauling me to the nearest Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and I ask the driver to name the best parts of Philly. A twenty-something black guy, he says, “I don’t think there are any good parts.” He clocks me in the rearview mirror and asks, ‘Are you the writer?’ The young man pulls out his phone and hits a number, saying, ‘You have to talk to my mom. Her favorite movie is Fight Club.’ … In 1999 the head of publicity at Twentieth Century Fox had told the director, David Fincher, ‘You’ve made a movie with so much male nudity that no man will want to see it, and so much blood that no woman will. You’ve made a movie that’s impossible to market.’ Yet here I am laughing away with a middle-aged mother and her son who both came to love the story.” (08/13/26)
- Sorry, conservatives. The “cancel Thanksgiving” candidate lost.
Source: Washington Post
by Megan McArdle“Democratic socialist Francesca Hong lost her bid on Tuesday to be the Democratic nominee in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race, but it’s not progressives who will be most disappointed by her defeat. It’s conservatives who will feel the pain. They spent millions attacking Hong in ads, calling her ‘too liberal,’ but the messaging seemed clearly designed to generate support for her among Democratic voters, based on the GOP theory that she’d be much easier to beat in the general election than moderate David Crowley. It almost worked, even though Hong was, to put it mildly, not a good candidate. Democrats should feel an unpleasant, crawling sensation at the base of their collective spine when they contemplate how close they came to having her on the ticket — not just because she’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but because she has a hard-to-explain history of radical pronouncements.” (08/12/26)
- We Needn’t Have a One True Platform
Source: Aaron Ross Powell
by Aaron Ross Powell“Not every coffee shop needs to be Starbucks to be successful. Not every place you hang out online needs to be Facebook or Instagram to be successful. Not even if it’s social media shaped. And not just because, as I’ve argued, your internet can actually be small, and be healthy being small. But because it’s actually kind of crazy to think that every digital space must be, or be on its way to being, the One Place Everyone Is.” (08/12/26)
- Official Ballot Lies
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob“With Republicans controlling most state legislatures, legislative assaults against the citizen initiative petition process tend to come disproportionally from Republicans. Just last week, Missouri voters smashed a legislative initiative petition ‘reform’ on the primary ballot with greater than 80 percent voting NO. In Democratic controlled states, however, attempts to thwart democracy bear Democrats’ fingerprints.” (08/12/26)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/08/12/official-ballot-lies/
- Trump on National Emergency Related to the Midterm: “Stranger Things Have Happened”
Source: Exiled Policy
by Jason Pye“During an interview with MAGA personality Wayne Allyn Root, Donald Trump appeared to suggest that a national emergency related to voting could be a possibility ahead of the midterm election. As previously mentioned, conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell floated this idea in September 2025 during an interview with former Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA). It seems that the idea has gained some legitimate traction. … Of course, Root never explains what law would actually give Trump the power to impose nationwide voter identification requirements, require documentary proof of citizenship, or restrict mail voting. Simply calling something a ‘national security emergency’ doesn’t answer that question. The administration would still have to identify a statute that authorizes what Trump wants to do.” (08/12/26)
https://exiledpolicy.substack.com/p/trump-on-national-emergency-related
- There’s No Real Evidence That ALPRs Make Americans Safer
Source: Exiled Policy
by Jason Pye“Flock says its network is now used by more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 6,000 communities, providing access to a massive and increasingly interconnected database of vehicle movements. Richard Hanania published a piece on Monday in which he rather boldly claims ‘Flock cameras likely explain the recent crime collapse.’ His theory is essentially a sort of Kalam cosmological argument for Flock. Crime fell rapidly at roughly the same time that Flock and other surveillance technologies proliferated, and Hanania treats that coincidence, combined with a plausible deterrent mechanism, as strong evidence of causation.” (08/12/26)
https://exiledpolicy.substack.com/p/theres-no-real-evidence-that-alprs
- The Posse Comitatus Presidency: Trump’s Standing Army on American Streets
Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead“The National Guard was just the beginning. One year after President Trump deployed military troops to the nation’s capital, we find ourselves navigating a posse comitatus presidency in which the visual trappings of martial law are the norm, not the exception. The Founders warned against standing armies on American soil, fearing that the military might someday be used not to defend the people but to control them. They understood something Americans are being encouraged to forget: soldiers and police serve fundamentally different purposes.” [editor’s note: Since the first US police force wasn’t founded until 1838, I doubt the founders thought in those precise terms – TLK] (08/12/26)
- Problem? Government the worst solution
Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal“If you count on government providing something, before long you may not have it at all. It’s the fox watching the henhouse. At the very least, government involvement doesn’t stop the inevitable. If something is not sustainable, putting government in charge won’t save the day.” (08/12/26)
- Stop taxing inflation
Source: The Hill
by Glenn Farley“With the cost of living on every voter’s mind, an old idea is getting a new push on Capitol Hill: fixing a flaw in the tax code that makes everything more expensive. Anyone who has ever sold a home, stock, or even a collectible is familiar with it. When you sell an asset that has risen in price, the IRS taxes the gain. But that gain is measured against the price you paid, not your true cost. If you bought a stock, a bond, or a business many years ago, and its price merely kept pace with inflation, you are no richer in purchasing power than the day you bought it — yet the tax code treats the difference as income and taxes it anyway. This is especially noticeable in periods of high inflation, like the last five years. It is a tax on rising prices, dressed up as a tax on profit.” (08/12/26)
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5980648-index-capital-gains-inflation/
- To Understand the AI Alignment Problem, Consider the Human Alignment Problem.
Source: Liberalism.org
by Rachel Lomasky“The AI alignment problem asks whether the autonomous agents derived from Large Language Models and other AI technologies can reliably internalize the objectives for which they are optimized. The problem is magnified because human objectives are complex and hard to formalize, it is not possible to monitor the internals of the systems, and previous behavior is not necessarily a reliable predictor of how the AI will behave in novel situations. Worries that AIs might find goals that ‘score well’ but don’t match human intent have become a fashionable topic, driven in part by news stories about AI tools behaving in unexpected and disturbing ways, which can be difficult to monitor and reverse. … Human alignment, by comparison, has never been effectively enforced, although significant effort is spent on trying to determine our fellow humans’ motives.” (08/12/26)
- Beware “Tax the Rich”
Source: Town Hall
by Betsy McCaughey“Taylor Swift is enemy No.1 to cash-grabbing Democrats in Rhode Island. They’ve named their new statewide vacation home property tax after her. But from the East Coast to the West Coast, ‘tax the rich’ is the battle cry of radical-left Democrats. They claim that by attacking the rich, including celebs like Swift, they’re saving democracy. Don’t be fooled. Their new forms of taxation — including wealth taxes, mansion taxes and pied-a-terre taxes — are fueled by jealousy and hatred for our free-market system, working people and everything American. You’re their next target.” [editor’s note: In fairness, McCaughey hates “free market systems” at least as much as Bernie Sanders or AOC. She just prefers different targets – TLK] (08/12/26)
https://townhall.com/columnists/betsymccaughey/2026/08/12/beware-tax-the-rich-n2681079
- Advisory Opinions, 08/13/26
Source: The Dispatch
“David Lat and Zachary Shemtob return as guest hosts and are joined by Adam Feldman, author of the blog Empirical SCOTUS and the Substack Legalytics, to discuss an update on birthright citizenship, some new polling about SCOTUS, and the criminal justice system’s newest heartthrob, Luigi Mangione, who will soon be tried for the murder of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson.” (08/13/26)
https://thedispatch.com/podcast/advisoryopinions/this-is-not-a-vibes-only-podcast/
- The Blessings of Liberty with Jeffrey Rosen, 08/13/26
Source: The Blessings of Liberty with Jeffrey Rosen
“This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History.” (08/13/26)
https://rosenjeffrey.substack.com/p/this-land-is-your-land-a-road-trip
- Kibbe on Liberty, episode 399
Source: Free the People
“Australia Embraced Tyranny During Lockdowns | Guest: Topher Field.” (08/12/26)
- The Tom Woods Show, episode 2786
Source: The Tom Woods Show
“Jason Arday and Our Embarrassing Academic Elite.” (08/12/26)
https://tomwoods.com/ep-2786-jason-arday-and-our-embarrassing-academic-elite/
- Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp, 08/12/26
Source: Antiwar.com
“Pentagon Admits To Major Civilian Massacres in Yemen, Trump Claims US Controls Hormuz, and More.” (08/12/26)
- Gracearchy with Jim Babka, episode 166
Source: Gracearchy with Jim Babka
“Four Tests of a Scapegoat.” (08/13/26)
https://rumble.com/v7dzivc-four-tests-of-a-scapegoat-gracearchy-with-jim-babka-166.html